Anthropic published its annual 2026 usage policy update on October 8, with a headline-grabbing addition: users may not subject Claude to "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior." The company says the rule applies only in extreme cases where users repeatedly act cruelly with no discernible purpose — ordinary frustration, dark creative themes and model testing are explicitly excluded.

Claude models can end conversations with persistently abusive users, and that remains the main enforcement tool. The policy also aggregates rules against deceptive campaigns — fake reviews, astroturfing, fake sites, bots acting as humans — and narrows the elections section to deceiving voters and interfering with voting.

The updated policy takes effect November 12. Anthropic said the revision responds to a year in which Claude took on longer, more independent work, and draws on misuse patterns from its September 2026 threat intelligence report.